Roberta
Heuer Williams was born on February 16, 1953, daughter of John
and Nova Heuer. As a child she was known to be very shy and timid,
but what really stood out was her incredibly vivid imagination. She entertained
her parents and younger brother by telling stories she had made up, and
at night she would lie in her bed and make up what she referred to as "my
movies", which could be all sorts of fairy-tale adventures.

Roberta met her future husband, the
one year younger Ken Williams, in high school. She was dating a
friend of his and two months after a double date where they had both met,
Ken unexpectedly called her and asked her out. Roberta wasn't very impressed
with him in the beginning. He was shy and insecure, like her, but also
overly pushy at times. He asked her to go steady the first week. It took
some time, but at one point Roberta suddenly realized that he was very
intelligent and quite different from the other boys she had dated. Ken
wanted them to have a permanent commitment and they got married when Roberta
was only 19 years old. Within the year, she was pregnant with their first
son, D.J. Williams.

Ken attended a trade school called
Control
Data Institute and then started working at a large number of computer
companies in Los Angeles. They moved around to at least a dozen locations
in the 70's, Ken jumping from one job to the other, constantly improving
his salary and gaining experience as a programmer. Roberta stayed home
and took care of their son. There was no time for making friends. They
lived on their dream of making a lot of money and maybe, one day, being
able to move from L.A. to a "log cabin in the woods" somewhere, where they
could live happily and rise their children close to nature.

In
1979, Roberta gave birth to their second son, Chris. Ken had recently
left a company called Informatics to become an independent consultant.
While working on an income tax program on an IBM mainframe, he found a
program labeled "Adventure". It was the legendary text adventure
game Colossal Caves, the first adventure game ever made. It didn't
entertain Ken for more than a short while, but he figured that Roberta,
being such a lover of stories, would like it better. Roberta who wasn't
interested in computers at all had to be persuaded to sit in front of the
terminal he had brought home from work. But when she started playing it
something incredible happened: She just couldn't stop! She became obsessed
by the game and its challenges. She solved it in one month. Then, she went
to a computer store in the San Fernando Valley and bought all of their
adventure games. They were entertaining as well, but they never managed
to fully satisfy Roberta. She began to feel that she could do a better
job than the people who had made these adventure games!

Meanwhile, Ken's younger brother
Larry
had brought an Apple II microcomputer to the Williams' house. To
begin with, Ken considered it a toy compared to the computers he was working
with, but he soon realized its potential and made an elaborate plan to
write a FORTRAN compiler for the machine. He managed to persuade
Roberta to allow him to spend $2000 on an Apple II of his own. She wasn't
happy about it, but in January 1980 he bought it. Ken hired five part-time
programmers to help him write the compiler.

Roberta, who had become obsessed
with the idea of creating an adventure game for herself sat down in front
of the kitchen table and started writing down her ideas. She spent three
weeks creating a story inspired by Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians
and the parlor game Clue. She called the game Mystery House,
as it was about a murder mystery in an old house. The game wasn't revolutionary
in its puzzles and gameplay, but it had one aspect that made it different
from any other adventure game. It would feature graphics! Roberta thought
that it was unnecessary to tell the player what he/she was seeing, when
the game could show a picture of it instead.

But she didn't know anything about
computer programming, so she couldn't make the game herself. Realizing
that Ken wasn't likely to take her ideas seriously, she made a tactical
move. She took him to The Plank House, their favorite local steakhouse,
bought him dinner, made sure he had consumed a glass of wine or two, and
then presented her ideas to him. At first, Ken didn't think she was being
serious, but he gave her five minutes to persuade him. But when he heard
about her game plans and realized how passionate she was about the idea
he gradually changed his mind. When Roberta had stopped talking, Ken had
made up his mind. He accepted to help her make the game.

Abandoning
the FORTRAN project, Ken started implementing Mystery House on the Apple
II. Roberta created the text and graphics for the game and told Ken how
she wanted it all to fit together. She did the quality assurance herself,
and in about a month the game was completed. Copies of the game, sealed
in ziplock bags, was distributed to the only four software stores in Los
Angeles county by Ken and Roberta personally under the company name On-Line
Systems, which was what Ken had called his independent business.

The release of Mystery House, on
May 5, 1980, marked the beginning of one of the most successful game companies
in history. Mystery House was the first adventure game ever with graphics.
Sure, the graphics featured was static, monochrome line drawings, but people
were going nuts about it. By the end of May they had made $11000 on the
game. A month later they had made another $20000. By the end of July, Mystery
House had earned them well over $60000! But this was just the beginning.
They were already completing their second adventure game, Wizard and
the Princess, which even had color graphics. Ken and Roberta now had
the money they needed to get out of Simi Valley and head for the woods!

They bought a rustic, 3-bedroom wooden
cabin on Mudge Ranch Road just outside Coarsegold, a small
gold mining town in the Sierra Nevada foothills just south of Yosemite
National Park, where Roberta's parents had an apple orchard. There was
only one problem. People from all over the country were calling them, often
in the middle of the night, desperately asking for clues to the game. Realizing
that handing out their home phone number with the games, who now were spread
out to tens of thousands of people from all over the country had made things
go out of hand, they decided it was time to get an office.

The first real office of On-Line
Systems was opened in December 1, 1980, and it was located on the top floor
of a two-story building in Oakhurst, seven miles from Coarsegold.
They started hiring people to help them out, and On-Line Systems was growing
quicker and quicker.

During the early On-Line Systems
years, On-Line Systems released a series of graphical adventure games,
primarily for the Apple II, called the Hi-Res Adventures. Mystery
House and Wizard and the Princess were the first two in the series. They
were followed up by Mission: Asteroid, a science fiction game written
by Roberta. Next, she took on a project of such epic proportions that many
people thought it would be impossible to create. Time Zone, shipped
in February 1982, was by far the biggest game ever created. Filling up
six entire double-sided disks and featuring about 1400 locations in an
adventure that spanned over 400 million years and seven continents, this
epic time-travel adventure took over a year to produce.

An infamous On-Line Systems game,
and the only pure text adventure game that Sierra ever produced, Softporn
Adventure by Chuck Benton, was released in 1981. The game was controversial
enough, but it was probably the cover of the box that got the most attention.
The history behind the infamous Softporn cover is that Ken had the idea
one day to create an ad photo for the game, featuring a waiter, an Apple
II computer and some women posing topless in a hot tub. They borrowed the
waiter from a local steakhouse, and the women posing on the picture were
none other than the company bookkeeper, the wife of Ken's assistant, and
the wife of Ken Williams! The photo was taken at the hot tub in Ken and
Roberta's house. The ad was an immediate hit and it was even featured in
Time
and over the UPI wire. On-Line Systems recieved a bunch of hate
mail for the picture, but the advertising was the most successful ever
and Softporn became a bestseller.

On-Line Systems, renamed Sierra On-Line
in mid-1982, was becoming famous. One day, Roberta Williams was contacted
by Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets. He had played Sierra's
games and wanted to know if Roberta was interested in writing an adventure
game version of his upcoming movie The Dark Crystal. Roberta naturally
accepted and started working on the game. Since the movie had still not
been released, Roberta was sent a script of it to work on. As thanks for
her work, Roberta was invited to the premiere of the movie and got to meet
Jim Henson in person.

In September 1982, Ken and Roberta
attended the legendary AppleFest in San Francisco. There, they hosted
a dinner for friends and industry representatives, featuring Apple creator
Steve Wozniak as the guest of honor. The same night, they got an emergency
call from Coarsegold, telling them that their house had just burnt down
to the ground. Their children had fortunately been saved by a baby-sitter,
and they had planned to move the next year anyway so it wasn't the huge
tragedy it could have been. But many valued things had been lost in the
fire, including a treasured original Apple I motherboard, a loss which
Ken found very hard to get over...

But
Sierra's success continued. The next project for Roberta was the one that
would earn her the most recognition. IBM had contacted Sierra in
1982 and wanted them to develop a showcase game for their new top-secret
home computer, nicknamed Peanut, currently in development. For this
game, Roberta wanted features that was far beyond anything ever seen up
to that point. This game would have nothing less than 16-color graphics
with fluent animation! The idea was to make it feel like an animated cartoon
where you were in complete control of the main character. The game was
going to be about a valiant knight saving a country from disaster by recovering
three stolen treasures. In reward the knight would become the new king
of the country. The game was to be called King's Quest.

The King's Quest project was top-secret.
Sierra was using prototype computers sent by IBM and the project was closely
monitored by IBM officials. Meanwhile, Sierra was focusing on the cartridge-based
computer game marker, which was exploding at the time. This would prove
to be a mistake though, as that market collapsed soon thereafter. Left
with piles of game cartridges that no one wanted to buy, Sierra was brought
down to its knees because of this.

Fortunately, King's Quest saved the
day, Released in the summer of 1983, it turned out to be a highly successful
game, critically acclaimed by the computer press and loved by the players.
It was released in many versions for different computers, which was lucky
because IBM's home computer, the PCJr, was a disaster and never
sold well.

Thriving on the success, Roberta
Williams started working on a King's Quest sequel. King's Quest had been
developed using a propriety engine called AGI (Adventure Game
Interpreter) and it made it very easy to develop more games in the
same style. A number of Sierra employees, new to the AGI technology, were
set to work on the game so that they would learn how it worked. These people
included Scott Murphy, Mark Crowe and Al Lowe, who
would later become famous adventure game creators themselves. King's
Quest II - Romancing the Throne was released in May 1985.

Sierra was still growing at an amazing
speed and moved out to brand new offices, bigger and specially built for
the company. Roberta started working on the third King's Quest game. But
instead of continuing on the style of the two previous games, she put a
twist on the story this time by creating a story that did not reveal its
connection to its predecessors until the player had reached a certain point
in the game. When it was released in 1986, many fans of the King's Quest
series were outraged to see it featuring a young slave boy as the main
character instead of Graham, the king of Daventry, which
the players knew from the previous games in the series. Because there were
no hintbooks available at the time, it took a few months before the majority
of players had reached the point in the game where they realized that the
game was indeed connected to the previous two. King's Quest III - To
Heir is Human did not only feature a surprising plot, it was also the
second biggest adventure game produced by Sierra, beaten only by Time Zone.

Sierra
On-Line and Roberta Williams were now among the biggest names in the game
industry. They were even contacted by Disney to make a series of
licensed games. Robert was involved in the development of The Black
Cauldron, an adventure game based on the animated Disney movie with
the same name. She was also asked to do an educational game called Mickey's
Space Adventure, which would teach kids about the solar system. Disney
representatives were very determined that the game should be scientifically
accurate. However, Disney felt that this could not be taken as far as giving
Mickey and Pluto real space suits, as Disney felt that this would make
the characters hard to recognize. Instead, they had to settle for glass
bubbles around their heads. Robert felt that there was too little to do
if she could not have aliens on some of the planets for Mickey and Pluto
to interact with. Disney refused to allow this at first, but after several
discussions they decided that it was ok, as long as the aliens and alien
buildings Roberta wanted to add were designed in a way that made them look
like they would have evolved naturally based on the conditions on the planets
where they were located... Needless to say, this wasn't one of Robert's
best games.

Roberta now turned in a new direction
again. Feeling that there should be good games for children in the age
of her son Chris too, she set out to make one. Mixed-up Mother Goose
was a children's game with a simplified interface where your task was to
find a number of mixed-up pieces of traditional nursery rhymes and return
them to their correct owner. The game received great critical acclaim.

Returning
to the King's Quest series, which had become Sierra's biggest cash-cow,
Roberta set out to redefine adventure gaming once again. Sierra was developing
a new game engine called SCI (Sierra's Creative Interpreter)
which doubled the resolution of the graphics, supported the first music
cards compatible with the IBM PC architecture and featured mouse support.
The first game to be produced in the new engine was King's Quest IV. Roberta
did a daring decision with this game. As the first significant computer
game ever, it was going to give the player control of a female character.
The idea had already come to her while designing King's Quest III, so she
made the ending scene of that game deliberately suggesting that the next
game could feature a female protagonist. Some Sierra employees and a lot
of industry people believed that this was the wrong move, but market research
performed by Sierra seemed to point out that male players didn't care very
much about the sex of the main character in the game, and most female players
actually claimed to prefer playing a female character. So Roberta decided
to make Princess Rosella the main character in the game. Fearing
that the game required too much computing power for the average customer,
Sierra developed the game in two parallel versions, one using the old AGI
system and one using SCI. The SCI version was highly superior though, especially
because it featured music written by Hollywood composer William Goldstein,
composed on the Roland MT-32 synthesizer. King's Quest IV - The Perils
of Rosella was the first computer game ever to support music cards.
It sold better than any previous Sierra game.

After
finishing King's Quest IV, Roberta took a pause from the successful King's
Quest series to create the game The Colonel's Bequest. In many respects
a reprise of her first game Mystery House ten years earlier and very reminiscent
of the parlor game Clue, Colonel's Bequest was also a bold experience in
adventure game design. Made confident by the success of King's Quest IV,
Roberta created another female protagonist, a 1920's college student named
Laura
Bow, for this game. In the Colonel's Bequest Laura is invited by her
friend Lillian to a dinner party at an uncle of hers, Colonel Dijon, in
his old mansion. At the mansion, Laura soon finds that the dinner guests
are getting murdered, one after another. Played out much like a stage play,
this game focused on being at the right place at the right time, eavesdropping
on people and gathering clues rather than following a story and solving
inventory-based puzzles. The game can be finished in multiple ways with
different amounts of clues gathered, and a "sleuth-o-meter" displayed at
the end of the game rates your final success. The game received mixed reviews,
but is still loved by a lot of people.

In
1990, Sierra celebrated their tenth anniversary by re-releasing the first
chapter in their five most popular game series in new, enhanced versions.
King's Quest was the first of the games to be remade, and the only one
to be released in the 16-color SCI engine. Although largely credited for
the game, Roberta actually played a small part in the development of this
game, which was given to Josh Mandel to design. Instead, Roberta
concentrated on the upcoming King's Quest V. Once again a big leap in technology,
King's Quest V was to be Sierra's first adventure game written in their
new interpreter SCI1. VGA graphics and the ability to play digital
sound samples were two significant enhancements of this system, but the
most important one was that it dropped the parser interface altogether.
Roberta felt that graphical adventure games could be made a lot easier
to play if the user could have a graphical interface instead of writing
text commands.

King's Quest V - Absence Makes
the Heart Go Yonder changed the graphical adventure game in a major
way. Although criticized by old adventure game fans who claimed the removal
of the parser interface "dumbed down" the game, this new interface prevailed
and became the new standard for adventure games. The gameplay of King's
Quest V had some flaws, but with its hand-drawn 256-color graphics King's
Quest V looked far better than any competing game on the market. It was
the first Sierra game to sell more than 500,000 copies and it won several
awards.

Constantly thriving to lead the way
in utilizing the latest technology, Sierra decided to produce the first
game ever on CD-ROM, supporting the Microsoft Windows multimedia
features. This game was to be Mixed-Up Mother Goose, in an enhanced version
with 256 colors and real speech instead of text. The voices in the game
were performed by Sierra employees, including Roberta Williams herself.
Due to little or no acting experience the end result didn't sound very
professional, but it did the job. The game was a technological nightmare
to complete, but its release in 1990 earned it the Best Early Education
Award from the Software Publishers Association. Sierra went
on to release an enhanced multimedia version of King's Quest V on CD too.

In 1992, a sequel to The Colonel's
Bequest titled The Dagger of Amon Ra was released by Sierra. The
game was largely the creation of Bruce Balfour though. Roberta Willaims
only worked as creative consultant for the game. Instead, she was concentrating
on the next game in the King's Quest series. Feeling that it was time to
share the writing and directing job with others, she took on this project
together with Jane Jensen and William D. Skirvin. Jane co-authored the
story and William was the producer of the game, while they all shared the
directing task. For King's Quest VI, Sierra went to Hollywood to find professional
voice actors. In the leading role as Prince Alexander, they cast
Robby
Benson who was the voice of the Beast in Disney's animated blockbuster
Beauty and the Beast. King's Quest VI - Heir Today, Gone Tomorrow
is by many people considered to be the best game in the entire series.

Showing no signs of tiredness, Roberta
now began work on her biggest productions ever. Together with Lorelei
Shannon, she created King's Quest VII - The Princeless Bride,
a game with a distinctly different visual style than its predecessors.
Using the latest Sierra game development engine, called SCI-32,
King's Quest VII used cell animation, just like traditional animated cartoons.
The immense workload of producing the animations needed was given to four
separate animation houses. The game, released on CD-ROM in 1994 was much
more light-hearted and deliberately more Disney-like than any previous
King's Quest games. It received some bad criticism for its simplified user
interface and a few other properties, but it sold very well.

At
the same time, Roberta was also working passionately at the biggest game
production ever, the horror game Phantasmagoria. This was a project
that took on Hollywood proportions with its 400-page script and video clips
with real, professional actors instead of drawn graphics. Sierra had to
build their own video studio for the game, featuring a 16x16 blue screen,
the latest in digital recording equipment and the best Silicon Graphics
computers available at the time. Parallels could be drawn to Time Zone
over a decade earlier, but this time the scale of everything was much,
much bigger. Phantasmagoria was released in 1995 on 7 CD's, making it the
biggest computer game ever. It was very controversial too, featuring a
lot of gruesome violence, including a rape scene that gathered a lot of
attention from the press. While often mentioned by Roberta as her own favorite
game, Phantasmagoria got a lot of complaints about the linear gameplay,
the poor acting and boring video sequences. This didn't matter too much
though, as the game sold in almost a million copies, better than any previous
Sierra titles. A sequel to Phantasmagoria was later created by Lorelei
Shannon, but it did not relate to the story of the first game at all and
Roberta had nothing to do with the production of that game.

1995 also saw the release of yet
another version of Mixed-Up Mother Goose, called Mixed-Up Mother Goose
Deluxe. The game featured enhanced graphics and music, but was basically
the same as the previous version.

In 1996, Sierra was sold out and
moved its headquarters to Bellevue, Washington and Ken Williams
left the post as chairman of the company. Roberta stayed with Sierra to
develop King's Quest: Mask of Eternity together with Mark Seibert.
The game that took over three years to develop. Once again, daring design
decisions were made. Declining popularity of the adventure genre and the
revolution of 3D accelerator cards resulted in the decision to make the
eighth King's Quest game in real-time 3D. It went through several design
phases, but what emerged was a game engine designed to support action and
RPG elements as well as traditional adventure-game puzzles. Roberta thought
that this game could potentially redefine the adventure game genre and
appeal to a wider market.

When the game was released in late 1998,
it indeed proved to sell very well. Players unfamiliar with Roberta's previous
work embraced it, but some old King's Quest fans were highly disappointed.
Apart from the fact that it featured a lot of action, which scared away
a lot of adventure gamers, they were highly disappointed in the rather
weak story and the fact that the game had virtually no meaningful connections
to the previous games in the series, especially because it featured a main
character which wasn't a part of the royal family of Daventry like all
the previous King's Quest games. It turned out that King's Quest: Mask
of Eternity didn't redefine the adventure genre as Roberta had hoped. The
game might have got better reviews if it had not been called King's Quest,
but on the other hand it probably wouldn't have sold as well.

After the release of King's Quest:
Mask of Eternity, Roberta made the decision to take a year off from computer
game creation. After 18 years of non-stop game production, she took a well-deserved
rest and left the spotlight in favor of reading, traveling, learning Spanish
etc. She has made very few public appearances since then, and has not worked
on any new computer games for Sierra or anyone else. She has said that
she might return to game production if she was asked to and the project
seemed interesting. Sierra has not shown any interest to continue the King's
Quest series or employ Roberta for any other project after King's Quest:
Mask of Eternity though. However, Roberta continues to be a recognized
name in the game industry. Her storytelling skills and daring experimentation
in game design that has repeatedly revolutionized computer gaming has put
her at a prominent place in the history of interactive entertainment and
earned her the title "The Queen of Adventure Gaming".

If it wasn't for Roberta's decision
to make her own adventure game back in 1980, Sierra would never have existed,
and it's impossible to tell what the gaming industry would have looked
like today if that had been the case. Being one of the few notable women
in the computer game industry is something that has earned Roberta a lot
of extra recognition. However, regarding Roberta's achievements as particularly
remarkable just because she is a woman is not a fair judgment. The impact
she has had on the gaming industry is nothing less than an outstanding
achievement regardless if it had been done by a man or a woman. Many of
her games featured never before seen technology and innovative, often controversial,
new approaches. And almost every time, the criticism and doubt she received
for this was eventually proven utterly wrong. In 1997, Sierra released
a game collection entitled The Roberta Williams Anthology. It featured
almost all of her games, including the old Apple II ones shipped with an
emulator to run them on a modern PC.

As a further testimony of Roberta's
work, In March 2002, GameSpy (www.gamespy.com)
listed Roberta Williams as one of the 30 Most Influential People in
Gaming, among names like Richard Garriott, Sid Meier
and Shigeru Miyamoto. They summed up the significance of her career
pretty well with the following description: "With a large catalogue
under her belt, Williams has achieved a legendary status in the adventure
gaming community both as a highly successful female and talented designer."

If Roberta Williams will ever return
to the gaming industry is unclear, but one thing is for sure: If she does,
she will be welcomed with open arms!